[babuskov]

I did this during university, but made it much more efficient. I wrote a program that would work like this:

- while reading, instead of copying, the software would ask me to enter "facts" in form of questions with the most important piece of knowledge being the answer. I would type the question and the answer into the software - much faster than writing anyway

- after I have gone through all the material, I would start the Q&A part of the software, which would ask me all the questions in either random order or sequentially (it was an option).

- at first, it would only show the question and wait for a key press to show the answer. After the answer was shown, I could mark whether I knew the answer or not. If not, it would mark that question to be asked in the next loop. This is basically the same as the asterisk method.

- once I got through all the questions, it would go into next pass, asking only those questions that I didn't know the answer to. And then filter out the remaining ones, and loop again and again until the all answers are known.

- then I would restart the whole system with all the questions to check.

What I learned after using this for about 2 years, is that there's a short term memory problem. Often I would know some of the answers on the first pass, but a week later I might forget it.

I found a way that works much better: Even if you mark that you know the answer, it will come up once again in the next pass. If you mark that you know it twice in a row, only then it would be removed. For some reason, this made the knowledge stick much better.

[thevinter]

You've implement some lite version of Spaced Repetition! There's a tool that does exactly that and it's called Anki

[amadsen]

Yeah this is spaced repetition. In this case the purpose is to memorize facts. But the asterisk method asks if you understand a concept. The purpose of revisiting asterisks is not to aid memorization via spaced repetition but to check if the understanding has improved after reading additional chapters. This seems like an important distinction.

[normac2]

This. There's also Mnemosyne, SuperMemo, and others. More here: https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition

[billti]

I use Quizlet for exactly this (https://quizlet.com/). Works great. I paid for the "Plus" plan and am happy with it. (I can't recall if I needed the paid version or just wanted to support the project, but recall being pretty happy with the free version too).

Lots of great Flashcard apps out there. Definitely a great way to learn - especially things that fade quickly if not using them regularly (looking at you, Powershell ;-p ).

[Trex_Egg]

This site has many useful methods and lists its technicality in details. Thanks.

[normac2]

gwern is an amazing resource and has great articles on a range of topics, including productivity stuff; his posts on nicotine [1], modafinil [2], and melatonin [3] would be 3 highlights.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

[2] https://www.gwern.net/Modafinil

[3] https://www.gwern.net/Melatonin

[fjfaase]

This is a good method for memorizing facts about some material that you understand. The asterisk method is about getting a grasp of material that is hard to understand. Your method is typically what is needed in studying subject like (foreign) languages and history, while the asterisk method is for subject where the primary problem is to understand the material, such as mathematics and physics.

[shurane]

Have you ever tried learning a spoken language by doing this? Like another commenter mentioned, it sounds a lot like Anki Spaced Repetition. It's very cool that you just rediscovered it, though.

[iamacyborg]

Duolingo certainly takes this method to an extreme. I’m not sure about spoken but I’m much better now at reading Spanish than I was this time last year

[zimzam]

FluentForever is based on this method - the initial product was actually a set of Anki cards.

[olau]

Intuitively, it does make sense. If you only ever encounter something once, it probably does not make sense to spend brain resources storing it.

[noduerme]

I think I've reinvented trigonometry at least fifteen times in my life when I needed to animate something roughly circular, spherical or wave-like. I still have no freakin clue which thing is a sin, cos or tan. I failed precalc (and they still let me work on video games!) But I do remember that a hypotenuse is the square root of A^2 + B^2 and from that I can pretty much figure out the rest.

[BeetleB]

As someone who did trigonometry every week for over a decade, I can say that reinventing it often will really slow you down. There is merit to memorizing the identities (of course, you should understand them well enough to derive them if you need to).

I was also better at solving problems involving trigonometry than anyone I knew - including my professors.

You could, of course, argue that if you needed to use it every week, you would know all the identities merely by using them so much. Don't assume this is correct, though. One of the reasons I used them so much is because I had memorized them. My colleagues who used them as often as I did and who didn't memorize them did not, in fact, have them burnt into memory after so much usage.

[MayeulC]

I had trouble with that, always going back to the "SohCahToa" mnemonic. Nowadays, I always use the unit circle. Cos is abs[cissa] (horizontal), Sin is ordinate (vertical). Rotate the unit circle (or your drawing) to align as needed, scale with the radius: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_circle

You can derive that back from the Pythagorean theorem, but only if you have the sine and cosine definition in mind (SohCahToa).

[pkaye]

> I still have no freakin clue which thing is a sin, cos or tan.

Atleast two methods I still recall:

1. Look up the SOH CAH TOA method.

2. Knowing that Sin(0) = 0 and Cos(0) = 1 can give a hint which one to use. You may know an equation should have a Sin or Cos but unsure which one so you pick the one that gives the expected results at 0 degrees. Works great for engineering type of problems.

[hyperpallium2]

First covid vaccine dose provokes a short-term response; second dose provokes a long-term immunity response.

Parallel adaptation of probability estimation?

[eggy]

Not long enough to require a third or fourth booster per Israel and some other countries, so not a good analogy unless we're all bad COVID students.

[garmaine]

To the best of my knowledge the first COVID vaccine dose immune response is not short-term, except in the sense that it is weaker and therefore will fade below an effective level in a smaller amount of time. But it fades at the same rate as the second dose. The second dose just "raises" the response level higher than the first dose got it.

[hyperpallium2]

Couldn't find my original source, but here's another:

> The second shot has powerful beneficial effects that far exceed those of the first shot,” Pulendran said. “It stimulated [...], a terrific T-cell response that was absent after the first shot alone, and a strikingly enhanced innate immune response.

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/07/immune-system...

[sabertoothed]

Can I recommend Mochi (https://www.mochi.cards/)? This is the tool I use to learn.

(I am not affiliated in any way apart from being a happy user)